The present invention relates to an information lifecycle managing system for determining a data management method in accordance of values of data and more particularly, to a system for performing data arrangement determination respecting performance during execution of a host application utilizing management object data by cooperating with the host application.
Generally, the information lifecycle management (ILM) is defined as “to manage information (data) such that the information can be utilized most efficiently on the basis of values created by the data in various phases beginning with creation of the data and ending in disposal thereof”. For example, when this definition is applied to management of business data held by an information system in an enterprise, values created by all pieces of business data the enterprise possesses can be maximized and at the same time the cost required for holding or retaining the data can be minimized, leading to promotion of costs versus merits in the data management. The thus obtainable merits differ greatly depending upon what criteria the values created by the data are evaluated with and what policy the determination of a method for data management on the basis of the results of evaluation is based on.
For example, in a conventional standard information lifecycle managing method, a data administrator sets, in respect of individual pieces of data, attribute information such as the degree of importance and access frequency of the individual data and the ILM system side for determining arrangement position and management method of the data makes a decision by consulting the attribute information of the data. For example, by doing such a protocol as “data having a high degree of importance and being accessed frequently are stored in a highly reliable high-end storage, data having a high degree of importance but undergoing not so highly frequent access are stored in a storage of medium access speed and good cost performance and besides data having not so high a degree of importance is saved in a storage of low cost”, the storage cost required for data retention can be reduced.
The aforementioned standard information lifecycle managing method is, however, confronted with problems that (1) much time and labor is consumed to set attribute information in respect of the individual pieces of data and (2) when the data arrangement position and retention mode are changed according to the attribute information, the influence the change has upon the execution performance of a host application utilizing the data cannot be anticipated.
According to a method called “Project Unit Data Management Method” and described in white paper concerning “Project Storage Migration” by Enigma Data Systems Company, 2001 (Internet:hppt://wwwl.enigmadata.com/pdf_files/ENIGMAPA PER_ Project_Storage_Migration.pdf), management object data are managed not individually but in a unit of group called project. Further, according to EMC News Release of Jan. 26, 2004 concerning “DatabaseXtender” by EMC company (Internet:hppt://www.emc.com/news/press_releases/view.j sp?id=2050), in a method called “Utility Utilization Data Management Method” and descried secondly, the access frequency in a unit of data is monitored by a dedicated utility so that data of low access frequency in a database may be moved in advance to a backup device.